"We need the rockets and trick speedometers and cities because, while you and your kind were being prudent and foresighted and not having children, the migrant workers, slum dwellers and tenant farmers were shiftlessly and short-sightedly having children--breeding, breeding. My God, how they bred!" * * * * * "Wait a minute," objected Barlow. "There were lots of people in our crowd who had two or three children." "The attrition of accidents, illness, wars and such took care of that. Your intelligence was bred out. It is gone. Children that should have been born never were. The just-average, they'll-get-along majority took over the population. The average IQ now is 45." "But that's far in the future--" "So are you," grunted the hawk-faced man sourly. "But who are _you_ people?" "Just people--real people. Some generations ago, the geneticists realized at last that nobody was going to pay any attention to what they said, so they abandoned words for deeds. Specifically, they formed and recruited for a closed corporation intended to maintain and improve the breed. We are their descendants, about three million of us. There are five billion of the others, so we are their slaves. "During the past couple of years I've designed a skyscraper, kept Billings Memorial Hospital here in Chicago running, headed off war with Mexico and directed traffic at LaGuardia Field in New York." "I don't understand! Why don't you let them go to hell in their own way?" The man grimaced. "We tried it once for three months. We holed up at the South Pole and waited. They didn't notice it. Some drafting-room people were missing, some chief nurses didn't show up, minor government people on the non-policy level couldn't be located. It didn't seem to matter. "In a week there was hunger. In two weeks there were famine and plague, in three weeks war and anarchy. We called off the experiment; it took us most of the next generation to get things squared away again." "But why _didn't_ you let them kill each other off?" "Five billion corpses mean about five hundred million tons of rotting flesh." Barlow had another idea. "Why don't you sterilize them?" "Two and one-half billion operations is a lot of operations. Because they breed continuously, the job would never be done." "I see. Like the marching Chinese!" "Who the devil are they?" "It was a--uh--paradox of my time. Somebody figured out that if all the Chinese in the world were to line up four abreast, I think it was, and start marching past a given point, they'd never stop because of the babies that would be born and grow up before they passed the point." "That's right. Only instead of 'a given point,' make it 'the largest conceivable number of operating rooms that we could build and staff.' There could never be enough." "Say!" said Barlow. "Those movies about babies--was that your propaganda?"